#4 in the Life's Little Problems Series
Color Outside the Lines
A Little!Danny fic by: Maj. Cliffhanger
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Part 14
The search for the mole was proving as frustrating and fruitless as the search for Ba'al himself. Cam sighed. Lt. Averham's alibi that he had been attending his nephew's bar mitzvah at the time Daniel's medical files were breached had been confirmed by multiple witnesses. Was it possible he'd arranged some sort of automatic download so he could give himself an alibi? Of course, but there was no evidence to suggest he had that kind of computer savvy; nor had Carter found any evidence of such a program on any of the base computers.
Of course, she had yet to find the computer that had been used to hack the O.R. system, so....
Next!
He set the file aside and opened the next, looking for discrepancies or questions that the original interrogators of - he flipped the face-sheet over again to double-check the name: Capt. Westerfield, Laura; RN - had missed.
It had been decided both he and Jack were a little too close to the problem and possibly a little too volatile to be involved in the direct interrogations at this point. When security had managed to find themselves a real suspect that might change, but for now....
Another large stack of folders suddenly appeared next to his dinner tray as Gen. O'Neill plopped himself down in the chair opposite with a gusty sigh. Cam eyed the other man as O'Neill scrubbed a hand through his short graying hair and decided the general looked as tired and frustrated as he himself felt.
"Any luck?" the other man asked.
Cam frowned at the two stacks of files he had: one double-checked, the other waiting to be. "Not yet," he sighed. "Our security guys are good. I'm not finding any holes or slip ups."
Jack nodded in shared discouragement. "They found some questionable financial deposits in this lot but they are all minor amounts. Could be early Christmas gifts from parents for all we know. I've ordered a full follow up on anything over a thousand dollars and am taking a look myself at files with smaller amounts. Coffee?"
Cam blinked at the non-sequitur and glanced at his watch: 9:30 pm. No wonder the Mess Hall was deserted. The kids had been gone for eleven hours now.... He winced at the thought and leaned back in his own chair to rub his hands across his weary face. The fine print was starting to make his eyes cross. "Coffee would be great," he decided as he dropped his hands once more. "Any word from SG-8 yet?" They were checking out an address Teal'c had provided.
The general answered with a negative grunt and shake of his head as he turned to the coffee machine. Ah, service coffee - made Mississippi bottom muck look thin and watery....
"Unscheduled off-world activation," the base PA system announced clearly. "Repeat: Unscheduled off-world activation."
Which, both Jack and Cam knew, could mean anything: could be SG-8, could be Teal'c checking in again or it could be some unknown baddie come a knocking.
It could also be Ba'al calling to negotiate the kids' return.
Flagging down an SF who was unlucky enough to be seeking his own cup of coffee at that particular moment, Jack pointed him to the table with the files. "Watch those!" he ordered as he and Cam both made their way to the exit. "Don't let anyone touch them!"
* * *
Landry frowned as he came up behind the gate technician; iris still closed and no announcement of an IDC.... "Report, Chief," he ordered as he eyed the closed barrier. In the back of his mind was the possibility that it could be Danny and Jason trying to get home and the very real danger that Danny's rewired brain might somehow forget about the iris - but Landry tried to dismiss the thought. The chances of the two kids managing to escape somehow, let alone reach a Stargate were....
"Unknown, sir," CMSgt. Harriman replied clearly, frowning at his instruments. "No signal. Wait... We have incoming!"
Damn. The fear of it being Daniel and Jason sky-rocketed up again.
"How many?" he forced himself to ask, knowing he couldn't order the gate opened - it was too late in any case.
Harriman and the technician beside him were both frowning at their screens. "It's not people sir," the chief master sergeant decided. "I'm showing multiple hits on the iris.... They appear to be small objects, sir." He shook his head in confusion. "Maybe arrows? They're traveling too slow to be bullets."
Landry glanced down at the men's screens but he couldn't make heads or tails out of the readings.
"Radiation?" he asked curtly.
Harriman shook his head. "No, sir; none detected as yet."
The general looked up as he found himself suddenly joined by Jack and Col. Mitchell. "What've we got?" the other general asked as he eyed the closed iris and reflected light of an active wormhole dancing across the back wall of the gate room.
"'Bit of a mystery," Landry decided and turned back to Walter. "Let's get Col. Carter up here to take a look and I want a team in there to scan the back of the iris as soon as the wormhole disengages."
"Yes, sir," Walter answered smartly.
Landry faced Jack and the colonel again. "Multiple small objects," he explained simply. "Someone's apparently knocking."
* * *
Danny threw the last of his rocks and stood frowning at the active wormhole until, with nothing more entering the event horizon, it finally shut down. Turning, he hurried back down the steps to where he'd made Jason wait.
"What happened?" the other boy asked.
"I ran out of rocks," he answered.
"Do we need to get more?"
"Maybe," Danny answered. "We just have to wait and see if they understood my message."
"What if they didn't?" Jason asked.
"Then we try again," he answered.
Jason glanced from the gate to the tree tops on their right. The gas giant they were apparently orbiting had set a little while ago and the sun wasn't far behind. It had taken them a while to figure out how to dial the gate. First Jason had gotten down on his hands and knees and Danny had stood on his back, but his arms were still too short to reach the far glyphs. Jumping back down, he'd told Jason to help him find a short but thick stick. It had to be kinda heavy to press the symbols, but not too heavy to lift or control.
And they'd tried again.
Jason had really gotten a scare when the gate suddenly opened. Danny should have warned him. He'd probably thought it was exploding or something! He'd jerked and Danny had tumbled off his perch. Fortunately, he wasn't hurt. He'd just run to the pile of rocks they'd stacked beside the gate and started lobbing them in.
Jason had stayed on the ground watching him, still a little afraid of the weird shimmering stuff that looked for all the world like a pool turned up on its side.
When it turned off, it became obvious the daylight was fading.
"I'm scared," Jason admitted quietly. "It'll be dark soon and we don't have any food, let a lone a tent. And we don't have any matches to make a fire either. We could starve to death or get eaten by some big alien monster or something! What do we do if it rains or snows or--"
"--I know how to make a fire," Danny interrupted him.
"Without any matches?" Jason asked.
Danny nodded. "Couple of ways actually."
"How?" Jason asked and quickly added, "Dad said the old story about rubbing two sticks together doesn't work."
"Not like they show it in cartoons," Danny agreed. "The easiest way is with a nine volt battery and some steel wool, or we could use a magnifying glass to concentrate the sun's light on some fine tinder."
"Do we have any of that?"
"Maybe." Danny was already marching over to his backpack to check it out. When he was throwing his books in there, he thought he remembered seeing the little gardening kit Mitchell had bought him last week. If he had, then his painter's brush and small magnifier might be in there too. Mitchell had tossed those into the mix trying to create a mini-archaeologist's tool set for him. He'd rolled his eyes at the time but he'd kiss Mitchell now if it was in there. How and when the make-do set had gotten in his backpack, he didn't know - he just hoped he was remembering right.
Fire, of course, wasn't their primary concern, but it was important. Some of the trees around them were starting to turn color so it could get cold at night. They were lucky to have their coats. He remembered how Jack had really drilled him on survival basics when he'd first joined the team, though Danny also seemed to remember picking a lot of stuff up over the years while living out of various primitive dig sites around the world. He specifically remembered Jack teaching him the trick with a battery though, even if he did already know how to make a bow and drill to start a fire - that would be a little hard without a knife right now.
Having no knife was not good. He was going to have to ask Mitchell to get him a little pocket knife when they got home. He should be able to handle one of the smaller Swiss Army numbers. Even a little two inch blade would come in very handy right about now.
With any luck, the SGC would send a MALP through any minute and they'd be rescued, but he knew they needed to start preparing for the coming night just in case. If the SGC hadn't responded by the time they got the camp set up and the fire started, they'd have to gather up some more rocks and try again. He'd decided against dialing the Alpha Site because he couldn't remember if it had an iris too or not. He wished he could remember more safe addresses, but Abydos didn't exist anymore and Cimmaria might have fallen to the Ori.
A lot of places he used to know might have fallen to the Ori....
He unzipped the backpack and simply dumped it out. He needed to see everything they had. 'What do we have, what do we need?' as Jack used to always say. "Got anything in your pockets?" he asked Jason.
The other boy dug into his coat pockets and managed to pull out some wadded paper. "Just some empty gum wrappers," he answered dejectedly.
"That's good for tinder," Danny told him with a nod. Yes! Trawl, spade, brush ... magnifying lens! He grabbed it up and held it to his chest as he glanced up at the position of the sun. They only had a couple of hours of daylight left.
"Okay, we're going to have to work fast. We'll set up camp at the edge of the trees and use some of the dead underbrush to make a wind break, but we need to get the fire going first, before the sun gets much lower."
* * *
Sam frowned at the readings as Walter quickly briefed her on what had happened prior to her arrival. Taking his place at the monitor, she quickly pulled up a diagnostic program. The problem was the gate's systems were designed to analyze incoming electronic and radio data, not physical objects. About all she could discern was that they were small, non-explosive and didn't appear to be radioactive. It could simply be someone throwing rocks through the gate for all she could tell! Watching the screen as it indicated another strike, she tried to detect a pattern - but if there was one, it wasn't immediately obvious.
And then the strikes suddenly stopped and the gate shut down.
"Carter?" Jack asked simply.
"I don't know, sir," she answered, quickly typing in a series of commands to pull up a record of the entire event. "I'm not detecting any anomalies in the gate readings. Whatever the objects were, they don't appear to have been harmful at this point. An analysis of any residue on the back of the iris will tell us more."
The big worry of course was whether this was some new Ori attack or not - like they didn't already have enough to worry about! It hadn't been that long ago they'd had to deal with the near disastrous results of an Ori plague.
"I want the gateroom to remain sealed until we can confirm no biological trace or contaminants left on the gate," Landry ordered even as Cam suddenly leaned forward to point at the screen in front of Carter which was presently showing each impact and it's intensity.
"What's that?" he asked, pointing to a series of impacts at the very beginning of the episode.
"Three groups of three impacts, each varying in intensity..." She wasn't sure what he was getting at but something about it caught her eye too.
"It repeats," he noted, pointing to another set a little further on.
"Three times," she agreed, "and once again at the end. But the pattern in the middle doesn't make any sense."
"You said three groups of three?" Jack frowned pensively.
Carter cast him a glance. He'd picked up on something too. "Yes, sir."
"Can we hear them?" he asked.
"The impacts were too light to really be audible in the gateroom, but I should be able to amplify the sound enough to let us hear them..." She nodded, suiting action to words. A few moments later and the high tinny sound of something hard hitting the metal of the iris issued forth from the speakers as Sam set the event to playback in real time.
(((Bing! Bang! Ting!)))
...
(((Bang! ... Bang! ... Ting!)))
...
(((Bang! Bing! Bing!)))
They all almost immediately recognized the significance of the three groups of three. The pitch and volume of each strike was different but there was a definite pattern to the interval of impacts.
"It's an S.O.S!" Walter exclaimed.
They listened to it repeat three times and then the pattern changed. Cam frowned sharply. "That's not Morse code..." he decided.
"It's a code of some kind," Jack claimed, though actually that was nothing more than a guess.
"I agree it's probably a code of some kind, but at this point we can't be sure of anything," Sam decided. "We're assuming the beginning groupings are an S.O.S., but it may mean something else entirely. If the beginning was Morse code, then why suddenly change to something else?"
"They'd also have to be from Earth," Landry added, "and we don't have any teams unaccounted for at present."
Sam nodded pensively and turned back to the equipment. "I'll try breaking it down by groupings and see if I can figure anything out."
"Let someone else do it," Landry ordered, shaking his head. "You have more important things to be working on."
Reluctantly, Sam nodded. No matter what the answer to the mystery here was, she knew it probably wasn't related to Danny.